Swirly Stars

I woke up around 2am today.  Decided to wander outside and what did I see?  The first clear night in weeks!  Time to practice my night sky photography.  Did a series of long exposure shots (30 seconds, ISO 800, f/3.5) but could not get the focus right.  This is one of the hardest things for me about shooting the night sky.  Auto-focus doesn’t work, you can’t see anything through the viewfinder, and your focus has to be perfectly on infinity.  Anyway, after 40 minutes of trying in 32 degree weather I gave up.  Looked at my blurry star shots and thought “Hey!  What if I merge all of these exposures?”  This is the result.  I think I like it better than the properly focused night sky shot I was trying to get.  I hope you like it – now I’m going back to bed.

Supermoon (almost)

Saturday is the night of the “supermoon” – a full moon when it is closest to earth.  Has not happened for 18 years.  (Thanks to Sean for the clarification!) I don’t know if we will have clear skies on Saturday so I decided to get a shot of the almost-supermoon tonight.  This was done with my Nikon D7000 camera, a tripod, and an 18-200mm zoom lens.  Settings were ISO 100, f/5.6, 1/125 second exposure.

Lens Flare Moon

Overexposed shot of the half moon.  The green image to the left is lens flare, in which you can see a ghostly reversed image of the moon.

Moon Halo

Moon with halo through a layer of high clouds.   Nikon D7000, 18mm, ISO 800, f/3.5, 5 second exposure.

I like the way this came out.  To me it looks like an exploding star with a shock wave and clouds of gas and dust.

DSLR Astronomy

Latest shots from my experiments in photographing the night sky.  No telescope, just my Digital SLR camera and a tripod. Click on the images to see larger versions.

Jupiter and its 4 largest moons – Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.

Nikon D7000, 18-200mm lens, ISO 1000, f/5.6, 0.25 second exposure.

The Orion Nebula (M42).

Nikon D7000, 18-200mm lens, ISO 6400, f/5.6, 2.5 second exposure.

Pleiades star cluster.

Nikon D7000, 35mm lens, ISO 3200, f/1.8, 5 second exposure.

Night sky.  Pointed the lens straight up, did a long exposure, wanted to see how many stars I could get in the image.

Nikon D7000, 35mm lens, ISO 800, f/1.8, 30 second exposure.

Night Flight

I was taking some long exposure shots of the night sky, trying to get the focus right, and a plane flew over.  The three lines are the lights on the wingtips and the tail of the plane, and the dots in the lines are the flashes of the lights.

Starry Night

Another experiment in shooting the night sky.  Camera was pointed almost straight up.   You may notice the stars on the right side of the frame look like little dashes – that is from the motion of the stars across the sky during the exposure.  Nikon D60, 35mm f/1.8G lens, 35 second exposure, f/3.2.